By now, you’ve likely heard that Apple’s iTunes Music Store has taken the #2 spot in music sales — all music sales – right behind retailer giant Wal-Mart. This tends to lead to one of two somewhat gloating reactions from Apple advocates. One is a sort of “rah, rah, go Apple!” attitude. The other is along the lines of “hurrah, discs are dead, go throw your CDs in with your eight tracks and vinyl while we leap into the future!”

A typical sentiment comes from Scott McNulty on The Unofficial Apple Weblog: “I have an iPod, an iPhone, an Apple TV, and I manage all my music with iTunes as I am sure many, many other people out there do as well… “

Eep. Any votes for “I have a Sony Cassette Walkman, a cheap mobile phone, a … TV, and I manage all my music on my bookshelf”? Is that more boneheaded nostalgia?

Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be this way — any of this.

Beaport Sync is a free, DJ-friendly music player / librarian / mixing app for Windows and Mac. On its surface, it looks like a hook for online music store Beatport and a beginner-friendly DJ mixer (two tracks, auto tempo detection and time stretching, pitch control) — and it is that.

But aside from the ability to mix and cross-fade, Beatport Sync has some features Apple’s iTunes lacks, which makes it potentially worth a download for just about anyone. First, it has real file format support: MP3 / MP4 / AAC / WMA / WAV / AIFF / FLAC / OGG (plus audio CDs, of course). WMA, FLAC, and OGG are all missing in iTunes. Second, it has advanced meta-data editing and file browsing, making it useful for organizing your music collection. What I really like: not only can you backup your library to external media, but you can browse external media, too. It’s a reminder that iTunes remains pretty primitive for listening and organization — it’s added some decent features, but not so much for the desktop listening experience.

Those aren’t a huge deal on Windows or even Linux with various reliable alternative music players, but they’re big news on the iTunes-dominated Mac. Native Instruments tells CDM that they do expect even their die-hard Traktor users may want Beatport Sync as an organizing tool or basic player.

As far as DJ-style features, this player is pretty decent for a freebie:

• Two-deck mixer with manual/automatic crossfader
• Pitch control
• Time-stretching and tempo detection, for smooth crossfades even if you don’t know what you’re doing (or you’re, say, folding laundry or cleaning your studio and want the software to DJ for you — it happens)
• Rip and burn CDs
• Access external devices for browsing and backup
• iTunes library integration (no playback support for DRMed tracks, though meta-data will appear)

I’ve been testing the release build since just before it came out, and I have to say, I like it. The player is largely no-nonsense, and in terms of format support and playback fidelity, it’s great. You also have the kind of hardware driver support you normally only get from a pro app. And the ability to browse through all your drives instantly is great.

I have just a few caveats for you. If you don’t like getting a music store advertised in your music player, be aware that Beatport is a prominent choice in the sidebar — and the only one. Of course, that’s not to say you can’t buy online music from Beatport rivals like Dance Tracks Digital, or your local record store for those who like physical media. While it’s an aesthetic complaint, you also get the blue and green Beatport colors, which look like they escaped from the local scuba shop. (Give us an alternative black skin, please!) Some might not like the hierarchical file navigation, though I actually do enjoy it. The one downside I did find significant is that there’s not much in the way of stream and radio support. Electronic-music centric Proton is there, if that’s all you want to listen to, but there’s no equivalent for the integrated Shoutcast support in players like Winamp and Songbird. (Hey, I want J-Pop followed by Turkish folk music, okay? Does that make me less of an electronica fan?)

Still, overall, it’s a great player. If you’re serious about your digital music collection, I’d say this is worth at least adding to your tool belt — and the price is right.

Beatport Sync [Native Instruments]

Previously:
MediaMonkey Review: The Ultimate Music Player and Library Organizer for PC (though, on PC, no reason not to run both)

Music lovers, online tools are getting more useful. They can even recognize that song you can’t remember (boy, there are there some evenings of my life I’d like back), and keep you from missing your favorite artists’ gigs in your home town.

Midomi lets you search for artists and songs the old-fashioned way, via text search. But it also lets you perform “voice search” by singing with a microphone. Here’s the extra hook for vocalists: you can put your own performances in here and get rated on your talent. It’s like Google meets American Idol meets artificial intelligence:

Midomi, via Music Gadgets.net

Next up, how often have you heard your favorite, legendary artist played blocks away from you — the week after it happened? There are various online solutions to this problem, but iConcertCal is unique in that it does the work of entering your favorite artists for you, by searching your iTunes library. Now, of course, this could lead to some embarrassing moments, so if you haven’t already cleared that guilty pleasure tune you ripped when you first installed iTunes, now’s the time:

iConcertCal, via the XO Wave Blog

iConcertCal works for both Windows and Mac versions of iTunes. Nice, but anyone know if there’s something like this for MediaMonkey?

Pandora lovers: Tomorrow, I’m having coffee with the founder of Pandora, the nifty music auto-discovery tool. Got any questions you’d like me to ask him? Let me know in comments before tomorrow morning (Wednesday) New York time.

For many of us, listening to music — and managing our collections of music — can be as important as making music. Jaymis has me sold on MediaMonkey, available in cheap / free versions, for Windows. Note that this doesn’t run on the Mac — feel free to discuss Mac alternatives in comments. Listening software is often one of those few apps we run every day, so here’s Jaymis’ exhaustive review of his favorite. -PK

I received my first MP3 file over ten years ago, as a zip archive spanned over three 3.5″ floppy disks. In the time since there have been advances in codec, hardware and software players, metadata formats and online sales, but after more than a decade the humble MP3 is still a dominant force in computer based music listening.

In my time as an MP3 consumer I’ve used a plethora of players, both hard- and software. In the early days, developers racing to add new features had me switching and trying out new applications regularly, but by the late 90s I was a dedicated Winamp user, even through the troublesome Winamp3 days. This all had to change. When faced with a year travelling and working in Europe I decided to retire my trusty 256MB “James” and replace him with a shiny, white, inevitable, 20GB (3rd Gen) iPod. After considerable wrangling (warning NSFW language and unrelated ranting in comments) I grudgingly switched to iTunes, which is an ok piece of software. Really. If all of your music comes to you via iTunes music store or major label CDs you’ve faithfully purchased and ripped (after reading and understanding any included EULAs) then you probably won’t ever need or want another media player. iTunes also has some truly fantastic features: Coupled with judicious iPod-based rating while travelling, Party Shuffle and Smart Playlists changed how I listen to music.

However, If you’re a discerning music listener. If you consume music which is copied from friends or MP3 Blogs, acquaintances with bands, records digitized from your dad’s vinyl collection, or if you occasionally change computers, use multiple computers or multiple ipods, then iTunes will eventually cause you grief.

It’s not the most full-featured application either. Apple’s “less is more” philosophy does make for friendly, simple software, but a quick look at Apple’s supplied Applescripts give you an idea of the basic functions they haven’t bothered with.

Enter Mediamonkey

MediaMonkey is amazing. I’ve been running it for 3 months now and still feel like I haven’t scratched the surface of what it can do. Here’s a quick feature overview from the site:

• Organize music and edit tags in your audio library with a powerful, intuitive interface
• Automatically lookup and tag Album Art and other metadata
• Manage 50,000+ files in your music collection without bogging down
• Play MP3s and other audio formats, and never again worry about varying volume
• Record CDs into OGG, MP3, FLAC and WMA files
• Convert MP3s, OGG, FLAC and WMA files into other formats with the Audio Converter
• Synchronize with iPods / MP3 players effortlessly and convert tracks on-the-fly
• Party Mode, which allows users to make requests while protecting your library from being modified.